Energy Access and Emerging Markets: Africa

About 666 million people had no electricity in 2023, and ~565 million of them (85%) lived in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the 2025 Tracking SDG7 report by the IEA, IRENA, UN, World Bank and WHO. The region connected ~35 million people that year, but population growth cancelled most of the gain: the number without power fell by only ~5 million. Some two billion people worldwide still cooked with polluting fuels (verify latest figure). This is the energy industry's largest unmet market and its hardest business problem. The constraint is rarely the resource: Africa has some of the world's best solar, large hydro, gas and geothermal. It is the other three factors of the power equation. Route to market: national utilities that lose a quarter or more of their power to technical and commercial losses and cannot collect what they bill. Capital: borrowing costs two to three times those of advanced economies, in dollars, against revenue in currencies that depreciate. Licence: tariffs set politically below cost, fuel subsidies that are hard to remove, and contracts that governments renegotiate. This section covers the access numbers and how they are measured; off-grid solar and pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) finance (M-KOPA, Sun King, d.light); mini-grids; the finances of national utilities (South Africa's Eskom, Nigeria's privatised distributors, Kenya Power and the capacity charges owed to independent power producers (IPPs)); fuel-subsidy reform (Nigeria, May 2023); African oil and gas (Sonatrach, NNPC, Mozambique LNG, Dangote's refinery); the World Bank–AfDB Mission 300 programme to connect 300 million Africans by 2030; and a worked example set in Nigeria-like and Kenya-like markets.